Amazon Responds To Wage Theft Post

I saw your story mentioning Amazon today. I wanted you to have our statement.

We have a longstanding practice of not commenting on pending litigation, but data shows that employees walk through post shift security screening with little or no wait.

Kelly Cheeseman
Amazon Corporate Communications

Two points on this.

1) Theft costs stores a great deal. If you go to Costco and some other outlets, they check your cart against your receipt on the way out. The Bloomberg story cited in Monday’s post notes that employee theft costs retailers billions.

Employee theft costs retailers an estimated $18 billion in 2012, more than any other type of larceny, according to a study by Richard C. Hollinger, director of the Security Research Project at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “This is a staggering monetary loss to come from a single crime type,” Hollinger wrote in his report, which industry trade groups cited in filings with the Supreme Court.

2) The reason to check the warehouse employees is to prevent theft, which by doing so potentially saves Amazon a lot of money. Amazon says it really takes very little time. Amazon’s case apparently is that they aren’t even squeezing all that much money out of the employees by not paying them while they are being screened. This begs the question: Why doesn’t Amazon just pay the employees for the time?

About Dave Johnson

Dave has more than 20 years of technology industry experience. His earlier career included technical positions, including video game design at Atari and Imagic. He was a pioneer in design and development of productivity and educational applications of personal computers. More recently he helped co-found a company developing desktop systems to validate carbon trading in the US.